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System Administrator (Worm) (AltPower!Taylor)

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0xFFF1 said:
More like in the way of Cauldron. At the very least, Taylor will have caused a massive recalculation of the existing Paths, for the more expensive
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People tend to overestimate how many bad things Cauldron actually wants to happen (rather than just not bothering to stop), and Path recalculation isn't actually a concern to Cauldron until it kills Contessa's shard. The Path changes every single time a parahuman triggers, every few months during an endbringer attack, and whenever Eidolon does something unexpected.

If Contessa ever has to intervene, I suspect it would take the form of planting clues or evidence on a server Taylor is going to hack in the future, in order to point her at people Cauldron doesn't care about.
 
Dur'id the Druid said:
Or him. But for annoying as he is, he doesn't deserve the danger.
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No, he doesn't, but there are mitigating factors: 1) However intelligent he is to come up with his conspiracies, everyone knows that "he" is a socially awkward, oblivious idiot; no one will assume he is the original source. 2) As part of the post, in his enthusiasm, he will partially doxx himself by (probably) noting that he didn't know all of what was going on, but he was there when some of the events went on, verifying them. This would partially distance him from being the source of the information.
 
I'm quite liking this fic. The premise is interesting, and I'm keen to see how Sudo responds to the inevitable counter-hacking once someone tries to fiddle with her Library of Congress database.

Excited to see more!
 
WillRobinson said:
If Contessa ever has to intervene, I suspect it would take the form of planting clues or evidence on a server Taylor is going to hack in the future, in order to point her at people Cauldron doesn't care about.
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Or more likely, people whose fall will further their ongoing plot of "keeping the USA from collapsing" - if anything, Taylor is an asset to Cauldron, and thanks to her idealism, one they don't even need to interact with beyond nudging her in the right direction.
 
Honestly? All she needs to do is retrieve ALL the deleted footage and Blackwell's emails and documents. She knows Blackwell is corrupt, so she just needs enough to out her.
If she cross-references the various deletions with what Blackwell is doing, she'll very quickly figure out that Blackwell is covering for a Ward.
While she COULD do this as part of a broader crackdown on shitty schools nation wide, she could stop as soon as she found out Sophia's a Ward and go public to expose a Ward engaging in attempted murder of a civilian.

Why? Because she could post it along something like:
"I had two projects. One was looking into the bottom 100 worst schools in America to out the corruption there, and the other was investigating schools in general to make sure they weren't taking advantage of Wards. (And, privately, alerting the Protectorate to leaks - I'm not a monster, and having met Legend before I'd rather have him in my corner that opposite it.)
Imagine my horror and disgust when those projects dovetailed. I actually had to dig into this because I honestly couldn't believe it when I saw it.
This'll probably make my work a little harder, but either the Protectorate is complicit in covering up a Ward's attempted murder of a child or they're so incompetent they let it happen. The perpetrator isn't just still there endangering other children, but wasn't even given a warning!
Legend, you're probably going to see this, I trust you to have good judgement, and this is apparently pretty close. Could you please go there and clean house?
For the rest of the Protectorate? This shot across the bow is your warning. For the sake of all the kids and other mothers out there, I am going to be dredging. If you don't want to be humiliated?
Don't focus on me, because you won't find me.
Don't try to hide it, because you can't hide anything from me.
Do clean up your messes, and admit your mistakes.
If I see good faith efforts to do things right? I send evidence your way.
If I see a coverup like I did here? I post it online, and maybe next time I don't bother to blur faces of mask voices. (Except kids, obviously. Again: Not a monster.)"

Bam. At the cost of needing to dig into the worst schools in America, and dig through the records of every school where there's a Wards program (Which she should be considering anyway), she would have a perfect explanation for why she would have this information (Fighting corruption, a stated goal), and why she would post it alone (It was so far beyond the pale, and children are in danger).
 
And now I just want to see the fallout and events that would happen directly because of that, they already had me hook, line, and sinker! Now you just make me crave this story even more.
 
There's another angle Taylor could use to ameliorate things for her in Winslow. She was crippled due to events at the school, but to her knowledge she hasn't even been interviewed by police over it.

So have her do an exposé dump on not the corruption of police departments in the non-metropolitan vicinity of Boston. Pick four other Brockton-sized cities at random, include Brockton as in their number, and demonstrate the corruption is systemic.

This will point all the fingers necessary at the utter investigative/prosecutorial failure to investigate her case, without pointing fingers at her personally.

It's also newsworthy in that everyone "expects" corruption in major metro departments, but showing it happens in lesser urban centers and happens with great frequency makes it a systemic issue.

The only trouble is that her case might get lost in the wash with the sheer rampancy of ghostskins in the BBPD (the term white supremacists use for their peers who infiltrate police and federal agencies).
 
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Honestly interested how a recruitment pitch by Cauldron would go, given her power would literally tell them they asked the wrong question at the right time, oh! Oh! Maybe she'll get Dr mom booted out!
 
Logos01 said:
There's another angle Taylor could use to ameliorate things for her in Winslow. She was crippled due to events at the school, but to her knowledge she hasn't even been interviewed by police over it.

So have her do an exposé dump on not the corruption of police departments in the non-metropolitan vicinity of Boston. Pick four other Brockton-sized cities at random, include Brockton as in their number, and demonstrate the corruption is systemic.

This will point all the fingers necessary at the utter investigative/prosecutorial failure to investigate her case, without pointing fingers at her personally.

It's also newsworthy in that everyone "expects" corruption in major metro departments, but showing it happens in lesser urban centers and happens with great frequency makes it a systemic issue.

The only trouble is that her case might get lost in the wash with the sheer rampancy of ghostskins in the BBPD (the term white supremacists use for their peers who infiltrate police and federal agencies).
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One thing for evidence of Wildbow not being good with numbers is that Brockton Bay is supposed to have a population of 300,000.
A quick Google search says that is larger than any city in New Hampshire, the best guess for Brockton Bay's location.
In fact, Wikipedia is saying the largest cities in New England has Boston at #1 at over 675,000, but Worcester is #2 at over 200,000.
So Brockton Bay would be the second largest city in New England after Boston by over 100,000 people.

I just realized my error, I'm using 2020 census data when i should be using 2010, but getting such demographics takes either a more carefully crafted Google search or actually delving through census data that I don't feel is worth the effort for this post when I can get a ballpark figure using 2020 census data virtually effortlessly.
 
Also, unless the age demographics are extremely skewed, a city of 300k should have much more than just the four high schools mentioned in Worm. Where I grew up, with only ~100k people living within city limits, there were three times that many.
 
Andrensath said:
Also, unless the age demographics are extremely skewed, a city of 300k should have much more than just the four high schools mentioned in Worm. Where I grew up, with only ~100k people living within city limits, there were three times that many.
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Except the age demographics would be skewed, as that often happens with cities on decadal decline patterns. The Rust Belt is a good example of this phenomenon in practice.
 
Andrensath said:
Also, unless the age demographics are extremely skewed, a city of 300k should have much more than just the four high schools mentioned in Worm. Where I grew up, with only ~100k people living within city limits, there were three times that many.
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Except that nobody ever said that Brockton Bay has only four high schools. That is purely your assumption because the characters don't talk about any other schools. Reasons not to talk about other schools may include not knowing about them, them not being accessible for character attendance, dismissance from consideration prior to the discussion or even momentarily forgetting them.
 
Logos01 said:
Except the age demographics would be skewed, as that often happens with cities on decadal decline patterns. The Rust Belt is a good example of this phenomenon in practice.
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I'll admit that I'm not familiar with that sort of pattern personally, but is being that badly skewed plausible when the decline is only about twenty years old?
 
Andrensath said:
I'll admit that I'm not familiar with that sort of pattern personally, but is being that badly skewed plausible when the decline is only about twenty years old?
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It can be. Parents who can move to a city better prepared to offer a safe and rich environment for their kids will do so when a city loses its primary economic function.

Couple this with the fact that joblessness has a negative causal correlation with TFR -- that is, unemployment (especially in women) causes increased communal infertility -- and it doesn't take long for the people who have kids to mostly move away to where the opportunities to afford raising them well are, and for the local population who remains to just have fewer kids.

If that persists for an entire generation, then you'd expect the next cohort of children to be a much smaller segment of the population a mere decade later, let alone two or more. Detroit, MI for example has a median age of 32, and the vast majority of the population is over 18.
 
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Andrensath said:
Also, unless the age demographics are extremely skewed, a city of 300k should have much more than just the four high schools mentioned in Worm. Where I grew up, with only ~100k people living within city limits, there were three times that many.
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There are twice that many high schools for half the population in my area, although the size of the high school student body at two of them (they are k-12, one is in the building of the former Arlington High School, but is now Christian Liberty Academy and instead of being just a high school is now k-12, with less than 200 high school students compared to Rolling Meadows High School or Mount Prospect high schools with over 2000) is so small that two (a private and a parochial) don't really count.
 
The four we hear about (Clarendon, Arcadia, Immaculata and Winslow) are simply the ones we hear about. Where I live, an area with a comparable population to Brockton Bay, there are a dozen secondary schools, so it seems likely there are more that simply play no role in the story.
 
Whitewings said:
The four we hear about (Clarendon, Arcadia, Immaculata and Winslow) are simply the ones we hear about. Where I live, an area with a comparable population to Brockton Bay, there are a dozen secondary schools, so it seems likely there are more that simply play no role in the story.
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The main problem seems to be people (including me for a while, I think) not realizing that the quote where Alec names the schools only names a few because he figured out which school Shadow Stalker went to, and thus stopped looking. They assumed that these were the only schools around because only those were named (along with not everyone knowing or thinking about the population size of BB), and they weren't analyzing too deeply. The 'only four high schools in Brockton Bay' thing got repeated across the fandom, and then it became the standard fanon.
 
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Also, it depends on who's defining 'school'. Are we talking the building? Or are we talking whose renting in that building. I used to work for the NYC Dept. of Education, and we had charter schools that took up a floor of a different school. Building-wise it was a single school, but we had at least one building that had three schools (renters) in the building.

Brockton Bay seems like the type that has a one building/one school sort of set-up.
 
SlickRCBD said:
One thing for evidence of Wildbow not being good with numbers is that Brockton Bay is supposed to have a population of 300,000.
A quick Google search says that is larger than any city in New Hampshire, the best guess for Brockton Bay's location.
In fact, Wikipedia is saying the largest cities in New England has Boston at #1 at over 675,000, but Worcester is #2 at over 200,000.
So Brockton Bay would be the second largest city in New England after Boston by over 100,000 people.

I just realized my error, I'm using 2020 census data when i should be using 2010, but getting such demographics takes either a more carefully crafted Google search or actually delving through census data that I don't feel is worth the effort for this post when I can get a ballpark figure using 2020 census data virtually effortlessly.
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Also tied into this is the fact that most New England states aren't that heavily populated. New Hampshire has a little over a million people in it. So If Brockton Bay was there, it would be a third of the state demographically. When that much of the population is in one place, local politics and state politics are pretty much the same thing. Anyone who wins Brockton Bay when running for Governor, Congressman or Senator is pretty much guaranteed to carry the election unless they literally offend just about everyone else. That means that they powers that be wouldn't dare leave the place to rot - fixing the place up would be one of the big issues for any politician in the state wanting to make it big, and anyone who succeeded would be guaranteed prominence at the state level and a chance at the national level. It also means that screwups in regards to Cape crime would likely attrack the attention not just of the mayor, but the Governor as well.
 
bissek said:
Also tied into this is the fact that most New England states aren't that heavily populated. New Hampshire has a little over a million people in it. So If Brockton Bay was there, it would be a third of the state demographically. When that much of the population is in one place, local politics and state politics are pretty much the same thing. Anyone who wins Brockton Bay when running for Governor, Congressman or Senator is pretty much guaranteed to carry the election unless they literally offend just about everyone else. That means that they powers that be wouldn't dare leave the place to rot - fixing the place up would be one of the big issues for any politician in the state wanting to make it big, and anyone who succeeded would be guaranteed prominence at the state level and a chance at the national level. It also means that screwups in regards to Cape crime would likely attrack the attention not just of the mayor, but the Governor as well.
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I'm just picturing something cutting Chicago off, although that is harder to do because it uses both Lake Michigan and the railroads, along with lots and lots of trucking. To a lessor extent (although far more in the 19th century) rivers and barges as there are rivers that provide access to the Mississippi River.
What I can't see is Springfield not immediately releasing disaster money and even putting out bonds to fix either the water access or the railroad access but instead decided on leaving Chicago to rot.
Chicago has 21% of the State of Illinois population, but it and the surrounding metropolitan area (Cook and the five collar counties) has about 3/4 of the State's population.

While a smaller scale, a city of of 300,000 probably has suburbs as well that would possibly have at least another 100,000 people, if not twice the number of people that live in the city, although that really varies by city. Some like Chicago the majority of people live in the suburbs, where 2 million live in Chicago and 8-10 million live in the suburbs (I can't recall if the figure of just under 10 million included Chicago or was just the suburbs).

I found a city that size being left to rot unbelievable, even if it had an economic downturn like Detroit, Michigan or Flint did historically.
If funds couldn't be found locally the State would step in.
 
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